Louise McClary – England

Louise lives and has a studio near the upper reaches of the Helford river in Cornwall, surrounded by the aspects of nature that constantly feed her muse. She feels drawn to the very rural landscape directly out side her door, the estuarial
mud flats that lie down hill from her home with their forever changing colours, never simply brown but ranging from skin tones to purple to blue hues and the channels cut deep by the tide forming big egg like shapes. Many water birds frequent these tidal inlets, and there is always some song on the wind, be it of curlews or shell ducks with their splash of burnt Sienna on their wing. There are also the creeks lined with ancient oak trees, branches twisted and gnarled sending an incredible lattice work of shapes into the sky and reflecting into the water. Quite often the creeks are shrouded in a deep shade in the first part of the morning then slowly the sun arrives and tops of the trees become lit with the rest of the tree half shrouded still, caught between light and unlight. When the sun finally gets in fully there is total illumination and everything begins to take on a brilliance, trapping everything to itself, fallen trees resembling bones of a whale or some prehistoric mammal entombed in mud.

Louise’s working process involves drawing and painting whilst outside nurtured within the landscape to in order to feel the subject in her bones. She then returns to her studio to fragment and distill what she has seen and gathered into her works of art. She feels deeply that the looking, walking, drawing, reading poetry and even collecting firewood shapes deep part of her world as a painter.